The Filipino American in Spaces of Liberal Tolerance: Satire and Reciprocity in Peter Bacho’s Cebu

In Peter Bacho’s novel Cebu (1991), Ben Lucero, a Filipino American Catholic priest living in Seattle, makes his first trip to the Philippines to bury his deceased mother. While returning to his roots in Cebu and Manila, Ben witnesses surges of religious and political violence that prompt his quick retreat from the poverty and corruption of the Philippines back to the “order” and “sanctuary” of Seattle (133). Literary scholars such as Elizabeth H. Pisares interpret Ben’s retreat as an escape from his social debt to the Philippines, arguing that Ben “evades what he perceives as a foreign Filipino discourse represented by utang na loob, or reciprocal indebtedness” (80). Yet Ben’s return can also be seen as a way of paying off a different social debt: his debt to the Pacific Northwest for providing a space of liberal tolerance. Throughout the novel, Ben shows gratitude to the Northwest for providing a space where violence, corruption, and poverty are displaced onto the history and geography of the Filipino homeland.

Despite Ben’s imagined removal from violence, in the second half of the novel the Filipino migrants living in Seattle become entangled in cycles of revenge and murder that rupture the distancing of spatial and historic violence in the Philippines. To pay off his debt to both his host country and homeland, Ben performs as the Asian American model minority and encourages his Filipino congregation to do the same by abandoning their diasporic cultural practices, which he reads as gang violence in the case of Filipino men and sexual promiscuity in the case of Filipina women. Ben sees such practices, such as loyalty to one’s barkada (one’s peer group and community), as cultural attitudes that are intolerable to the Northwest’s multicultural social space because they foster religious ignorance and gang violence.

As murders continue to pile up in Seattle’s International District and migrant Filipinos are thrown into cycles of revenge, Ben identifies the violence as a Filipino cultural aberration, discovering “something in [Filipino] culture, however diluted it was by life in America, that allowed wild swings in cruelty and compassion, that . . . tolerated, even glorified, violence” (149). For Ben, a US-born Filipino American, Filipino culture promotes a level of violence that “life in America” must dilute. When the violence in Seattle becomes so overwhelming that Ben cannot escape into his “aesthetic afternoon” at the Cascade mountain range (165), his impulse is to interpret the killings as a diasporic remnant of the Filipino homeland: “Ben wondered how many more would die before the killing would run its course. He feared the worst. He knew how Filipinos could nurture hatred, black and seemingly eternal, treating it like a pet sore to be scratched routinely to keep it from healing.” “[H]atred” and “killing” here become innate characteristics of the Filipino “fresh off the boat” (FOB) migrant, forming a diasporic residue that might affect other Asian Americans, such as Ben’s childhood friend Teddy, who “was like [the Filipinos], and Ben was afraid that, at his own deepest core, he was too” (157).

Published in 1991, Cebu considers how spaces of liberal tolerance are imagined during a national peak in violent crime and the rapid expansion of the prison industrial complex.¹ The novel depicts an American culture of violence that seems to be generated through police indifference, South Seattle segregation, economic inequality, and the historical violence of the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), World War II (1939–45), and the Vietnam War (1965–73). Yet Ben ignores these structural and political causes, instead blaming the migrants themselves for choosing to retain intolerable versions of their culture. In order to continue a narrative of liberal tolerance that always posits the United States as the bastion of multiculturalism, Ben must locate violence within the migrant’s choice to retain a particularly intolerable cultural form of behavior rather than within the political sphere, concluding at last that it is up to the individual Filipino to overcome his intolerable way of life.

Bacho’s portrayal of Ben as a...